I have had severe chronic insomnia for 15. Along with PTSD, depression, and anxiety, which is all my therapists, psychiatrists, and doctors would treat, always promising the insomnia would resolve when I got my other diagnoses under control. But how do you resolve trauma when every single night is retraumatizing? Pannell is the only sleep advice expert that I have ever listened to that actually truly understands insomnia: the anxiety ABOUT sleep that no provider seems to get, the way it controls your life, every minute of the day becoming obsessive ritual to attempt to unlock the right code to sleeping, the true hell that life becomes. I am not exaggerating when I say that years of “true” Trauma did not break me the way insomnia did. No abuse gave me the suicidal fantasies that insomnia did. I thought my insomnia must be so much worse, so much different and more deeply rooted in who I am than it was for others if no sleep advice seemed to work for me. I berated myself for not being able to meditate well enough, that I must be doing relaxation techniques wrong, that my anxious brain must be seriously so damaged as to override its need to sleep.

When Joseph disparaged sleep hygiene and relaxation techniques and all the rituals we create trying to do everything perfectly in order to get sleep, I could have kissed him. I have only begun to implement these techniques and was going to wait to write my review after I’ve been “cured,” but  he has instilled such confidence (for the first time in 25 years) in my ability to implement these techniques and that they’ll work, that I don’t even need to wait for them to work before writing this. That’s a miracle by itself.

He has given me a kind of hope and promise that I never thought I’d ever have. I am so grateful for this wonderful, wonderful man. At the very least I know for the first time I’m not alone.